CHAPTER VII.
PETITIONS----BLOOMERS----LECTURES.
1854.
Considerable space has been given to detailed accounts of these early conventions to illustrate the prejudice which existed against woman's speaking in public, and the martyrdom suffered by the pioneers to secure the right of free speech for succeeding generations.

From this time until the merging of all questions into the Civil War, such conventions were held every year, producing a great revolution of sentiment in the direction of an enlarged sphere for woman's activities and a modification of the legal and religious restraints that so long had held her in bondage.

They have been fully described also in order to indicate some of the causes which operated in the development of the mind and character of Susan B.Anthony, transforming her by degrees from a, quiet, domestic Quaker maiden to a strong, courageous, uncompromising advocate of absolute equality of rights for woman.
Brought into close association with the most advanced men and women of the age, seeing on every hand the injustice perpetrated against her sex and hearing the magnificent appeals for the liberty of every human being, her soul could not fail to respond; and having passed the age when women are apt to consecrate themselves to love and marriage, it was most natural that she should dedicate her services to the struggle for the freedom of woman.

She did not realize then that this would reach through fifty years of exacting and unending toil, but even had she done so, who can doubt that she freely would have given up her life to the work?
In the ten weeks before the State convention at Albany, 6,000 names were secured for the petition that married women should be entitled to the wages they earned and to the equal guardianship of their children, and 4,000 asking for the suffrage.

Miss Anthony herself trudged from house to house during that stormy winter, many of the women slamming the door in her face with the statement that they "had all the rights they wanted;" although at this time an employer was bound by law to pay the wife's wages to the husband, and the father had the power to apprentice young children without the mother's consent, and even to dispose of them by will at his death.